technonaturalist

Early in December we realised we hadn’t been swimming for a while. After a hefty argument (JJ prefers swimming in fresh water, the bigs and I strongly prefer the beach and 8yo doesn’t care as long as it’s swimmable) we hit up Serpentine Falls with a friend and their kids.

The first thing we noticed was that the blackberry bushes had been cleared out and when we got there the top carpark closer to the falls was closed, though there were some cars in there (either ignoring the fact the gate was supposed to be shut or perhaps they were in there before it had been shut).

Farewell 2017, happy 2018!

I did my usual and had a drink while 3d-ing. I probably should have taken a photo of the drink for the benefit of the steem crowd but didn’t. JJ piked out but the kids stayed up with me (probably for the novelty of staying up til midnight as 8yo’s bedtime is 8, and the big two at 9:30). Despite procrastinating for pretty much the entire day I managed to finally close the retopo and have started painting.

I was supposed to do this before Silly Season kicked all the way in and…well I’m in some downtime before it arcs up fully so here we go XD

Retopo is going slowly and painfully as per usual. I just have to finish the wings and then I can start painting, and hope that my retopo job isn’t completely crap and that he animates all right. Then after that I have to fix the rig and give him some hair and then maybe have a little fun while I work out who I’m doing next.

The kids wanted to go trick or treating for Halloween, so we ended up doing some quick Halloween research and reading and decided that the proper way to do things was not to do the commercialised going around begging for candy but to give the neighbours candy. However we had no time to prepare for that and 10yo’s birthday was kind of vaguely in the vicinity so we decided to do a “spooky themed” birthday party instead.

Last progblog I’d finished light and shadow 1. I hoped I could get light and shadow 2 done in one session. I did get there eventually XD

Light and shadow 3 should theoretically go a little bit quicker as they’re kind of emphasis layers. I’ll decide then whether they’re high enough to do caustics, at this stage I’m likely to bail as doing caustics on this many characters feels a little bit daunting. Hoping to knock this one off tomorrow, but that will depend on what else is happening tomorrow.

Last progblog I was starting to work on patterning the merminnows with help from my frenemy Google Image Search (for minnow and danio, I didn’t even know what a danio was until I started searching, but they are tiny and have interesting patterns). After about a million billion trillion years, the flats got done:

And then about that again, light and shadow 1:

8yo kicked off the month by discovering that bubble bath mixed with water is a much more effective bubble mix than detergent mixed with water, and that pipe cleaners are easily repurposed into bubble wands.

I’m not sure whether he made that discovery on his own or was assisted or led by 10yo.

There had been vague plans to host a Halloween party as the kids want to dress up and do spooky things, and then it was decided that 10yo should have a spooky themed birthday party seeing as it was close enough, and the boys could invite their friends too. The smalls set about making invitations, directed by 10yo.

I originally intended to combine July, August and September into one post as I didn’t think I had kept track of enough material to be able to make a post each. As it turned out I was wrong (which is not unusual when it comes to the home ed front, I always think that I have been terribly slack any given month and find out we’ve done more than I thought). However some of the September stuff still got caught up in the July/August mashup so this is the rest of September that escaped.

Got this request on Discord from @kubbyelizabeth:

Happy to help out a steemate where I can, I agreed and asked her what she would like me to draw. The answer:

and then when I asked when she needed it by, it was along the lines of “whenever it’s done”.

Easiest client in the universe to work for! XD

Haven’t really had a chance to work much on this lately, always other things demanding attention (and apparently I’m not supposed to take time out of sleep to make up for it but that’s pretty much all I got left).

Tail retopo is driving me up the wall a little bit, I had quite a few goes before I got a mesh I’m vaguely happy with. What I wanted was to just draw the mesh and smoothe it later but apparently my lines were so terribly wonkered that I need to fix everything before I can proceed.